


judge them whole

by Stonestrewn



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-01-29
Packaged: 2019-03-11 01:21:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13513797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stonestrewn/pseuds/Stonestrewn
Summary: Leliana’s lips are thin, her jaw set. She did not come to seek opinion or to gather the account of a witness. She came to confirm what she had already decided.





	judge them whole

“Was it her?” 

It is a new habit of Leliana’s to initiate conversations as though they were already in stride. Cassandra frowns, kneeling on the stone floor. The tension she has painstakingly expelled from her shoulders snaps back into place. 

“I am in prayer,” she says, and regrets it. She should have kept quiet, kept her fingers clasped and her eyes closed and waited until Leliana left the chantry, as silent and unnoticeable as she came. Now that Cassandra has acknowledged her, she won’t. 

“Was it her?” Leliana repeats. Her voice is low, deliberate, as it nearly always is. 

Cassandra opens her eyes. The light from the windows is dazzling at first, she must squint against it. Turning around, her eyes are unaccustomed to the gloom by the door. 

“Who?”

Leliana does not bother concealing her impatience. “You saw Most Holy in the Fade. Was it truly her?”

“I do not know,” Cassandra says, honest. “It may have been.” 

“So it wasn’t.”

Leliana’s lips are thin, her jaw set. She did not come to seek opinion or to gather the account of a witness. She came to confirm what she had already decided.

“That’s not what I said.”

“I know what you said.” There are lines on each side of Leliana’s mouth, from its corners to her jaw. Not wrinkles, but lines, like the light indentations left after pressure. They are new since the conclave, she carries her face differently now. Perhaps they both do. “It wasn’t Justinia. It was nothing.”

Cassandra takes a step towards her. “Leliana, I do not know. She recognized me, she spoke to me as Justinia did…” 

“You want to believe it was she.” 

“Yes. I do,” Cassandra says. It is the truth. She only ever wishes to speak the truth. “But I must question when I cannot be certain, I must keep my mind open to doubt so that false certainty won’t lead me astray. When I say I do not know, I mean just that. None of us can know.”

“It wasn’t her.”

“Would you consider, for once, that your interpretation is not guaranteed to be the truth of something?”

Leliana looks at her with something that sits between amusement and pity, like an indulgent nanny with a charge claiming the gardens brim with fairies. It is a particular cruelty of hers, well honed and precisely applied. She moves towards the door. “I shall leave you to your prayers.”

Perhaps it is a cruelty of Cassandra’s that she says: “She had a message for you.”

Leliana stills. “I heard,” she says, and her words are clipped, heavy and flightless. 

Cassandra’s own words soften. “She believed she failed you.”

“It. Not she.” Leliana does not lose her composure with her temper. “How could she have failed me? How could she possibly have thought that?” She looks Cassandra in the eye for the first time since she entered. “No. _It_ wasn’t her.”

What is Cassandra to reply? When Leliana is set on making Justinia her loss alone, when she cuts through people like a serrated knife only because she can. 

This is the true cruelty: the merciless lack in the wake of death. What it does to the people who live. 

Leliana makes to leave, but pauses with a hand on the door handle. “No message for you?”

“None.”

“You’re lucky, then.” Leliana throws her a thin smile over her shoulder, her hood casting her eyes in shadow. “You’re nobody’s failure, Cassandra.”

She slips out the door and is gone, leaving Cassandra with no chance to disagree.


End file.
